Lore building

After watching a short documentary about artist Jerry Gretzinger I’m beginning to wonder if world-building is its own artform distinct from storytelling. Gretzinger has been building a world map for most of his life. Every day he works on it a little bit using a deck of cards to set tasks for himself and now his map is 4000 contiguous pages that have been filled, layered, erased, and backfilled.

So, of course, I had to make my own version. Instead of maps, though, I’m developing Lore in short written passages saved as markdown files. The main inspiration I took from Gretzinger’s deck was to build system maintenance into the deck. It’s not just about adding elements, it forces the writer to also connect elements, seed elements, index them, and even destroy them sometimes.

Yesterday, I finally had Claude try out the Lore Builder system itself. It created a weird esoteric world centered on river crossings where the world of the dead is on the river’s other side, and the people on the living side have strict rules on who can cross. And because all the writing is in markdown I can make it into an Obsidian vault that I can navigate.

So far the deck has been producing interesting combinations. My lore builder deck has 52 cards. Half are Task cards, and the other half are Elements. So you combine a task with an element each hand. My next goal is to start my own lore library and have Claude Cowork manually update all the connections and indexes while I edit pages in Obsidian.

Also, NotebookLM now has makes video “shorts” which is pretty good for focused material, like this example about how the deck uses elements to generate other elements.